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We start with an excellent comment from user “damien” from Moon of Alabama that sums up the ridiculous, and staged, attention the western MSM pays blogger Elliot Higgins, aka Bellingcat…

Charles Wood, an expert in digital images and metadata, takes issue with Higgins’s treatment of image data. A Russian blogger NTV makes similar objections. And a Dutch blogger provides credible evidence that Higgins has himself been faking his key photographs.

In relation to MH17 Russia Insider blogger Byzantium provides an outstanding survey of all the key evidence issues, in the process further discrediting Bellingcat.

The BUK missile system’s manufacturer Almaz-Antey gets into the picture. The company had been the subject of European sanctions over the use of its missile on MH17 and appealed to the European Court of Justice:

On the strength of a technical study of the aircraft damage Almaz-Antey claims MH17 was shot down by a BUK missile of a type not made in Russia since 1999.Almaz-Antey claims the BUK was launched from near the settlement of Zaroschshenskoe, which is in the area where the Russian satellite imagery show a Ukrainian BUK missile launcher present on the day of the tragedy.

Almaz-Antey rules out on technical grounds any possibility of MH17 having been shot down by a BUK missile launched from Snizhnoe, which is the theory favored by those who say MH17 was shot down by the militia.

Meanwhile Higgins has been adopted as an expert by the Atlantic Council and is one of the coauthors of a key anti-Putin report by the Council leadership which was published on May 28. Higgins is described as “a Visiting Research Associate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London”. The Council also sponsored him on a trip to Ukraine.

You have to ask why this amateur is given this level of political prominence. Blogger Deep Resource identifies some of his backers.

Bellingcat aka Elliot Higgins is nothing more than a simple charlatan. This guys 15 minutes are way over. Let’s move on to the real experts and pros in order to finally uncover the MH17 coverup.

Eliot Higgins aka Brown Moses, the founder of Bellingcat “by and for citizen investigative journalists”, is beloved by NATO media. Higgins is always able to “prove” by amateur “analysis” of open source data that the “bad guys”, just as the U.S. or NATO claim, did indeed do the bad thing that happened. The problem is that Higgins is no expert of anything. He was an unemployed office worker who looked at Youtube videos from Syria and tried Internet searches to find out what weapons were visible in the videos. That is all that made him an “expert”.

But Higgins claimed to prove that the Syrian government launched rockets with Sarin on Ghouta, an area south of Damascus. An MIT professor and real expert proved (pdf) that he was wrong.

Higgins claimed to “prove” that rockets launched from Russia hit Ukraine by looking at aerial pictures of impact craters. But a real expert of the method said that crater analysis is “highly experimental and prone to inaccuracy” and warned against its use without further corroboration.

Now another “expert” of Bellingcat, who’s source of “expertise” is unknown but likely also low, tries to prove that Russia manipulated some aerial pictures it published about the MH17 airline incident in Ukraine. That madesomesplash in the usual NATO media but is complete nonsense. Yes, the pictures were obviously “manipulated” as labels were added to them. But that the visual content of the pictures were changed, as the “expert” claimed to prove by a JPEG compression analysis, is clearly bullshit. The “expert” claims that “all image content should present roughly the same [compression] error levels if the photo has not been altered.” That is nonsense. JPEG compresses a flat white surface with low error level and a rough multicolor part of a picture with a higher compression error level. That is digital compression 101 which I myself learned when I was doing a bit of math work on the early PNG format definition. So it turns out that the “expert” simply doesnot understand how JPEG compression works.

Out of three big “finds” that made it into the media Higgins and Bellingcat had three that were proven to be wrong by real experts. Any media who further quote “analysis” by the “experts” Higgins and Bellingcat should be regarded as propaganda outlet and not as a serious source of news.

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December 18, 2015 04:40

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Antonovs

The amateurism of western media displayed.

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January 3, 2016 18:25

Guest

Marius

Bellingcat’ s proof: It was a BUk, BUK’s are used by such and such Russian unit, there are 20 men in that unit, so one of them did it.
Conveniently forgetting BUK’ s are being used by Ukraine, Finland, Malta etc

No buk missile trail was seen by any eyewitness. On the Ukrainian government webpage was shown the alleged Russian buk 312 but buk 312 was a Ukrainian buk. Video of this buk 312 was taken during a traffic control in Yasynuvata on March 2014. Buk 312 can also been seen in a video while driving through Gorlovka. Video was uploaded on on March 5th 2014. Then there is a video with a Ukrainian sergeant who drove the buk 312 himself giving evidence what the number “312” mean and that indeed it was a Ukrainian buk. Actually no buk was used… Read more »